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First Lines Meme
Aug. 30th, 2008 08:38 pmVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kyuuketsukirui, a meme that got me interested:
Post the first line from your 25 most recent fanfics and try to find a pattern.
Drabbles ignored, all HP except for one Whoniverse, and with a liberal interpretation of 'first line' to include first paragraph if it's short and basically expressing a single thought. Not linked individually below, but except for the first (i.e. most recent, not yet posted) and the TW one they're all well linked on the ficjournal. (Also, 25? That's quite a lot -- about two-thirds of the total for me, and I'm relatively prolific. If anyone else wants to pick this up, please feel free to interpret it as 'up to 25'.)
( The list -- 'A Law of the Medes and Persians' to 'The Wolf Covers Its Tracks' )
So, what can I say? Actually, I'm surprised -- I'd remembered my first lines as being as mundane as my titles, but although some of them are, in most cases I seem to have actually made the effort to produce something a bit intriguing in an attempt to pull the reader into the story, just as the style guides tell you to do. Quite often I seem to go for a touch of humour, too. Well, well. There are a few that are just there to get the ball into play, as it were, but with any luck in those cases the first scene as a whole will be enough to pique interest.
I do wince at a few of the clumsier ones, and I also seem to be rather verbose at times, don't I? Some of those openings are practically paragraphs in their own right.
There are also a number of very short ones, mostly lines of dialogue -- but I think that can also help to pull the reader in? It usually indicates that we've arrived in the middle of a situation just at the point where something is about to or beginning to happen, and hopefully gets the reader thinking "hang on, what's going on here?".
kyuuketsukirui, a meme that got me interested:Post the first line from your 25 most recent fanfics and try to find a pattern.
Drabbles ignored, all HP except for one Whoniverse, and with a liberal interpretation of 'first line' to include first paragraph if it's short and basically expressing a single thought. Not linked individually below, but except for the first (i.e. most recent, not yet posted) and the TW one they're all well linked on the ficjournal. (Also, 25? That's quite a lot -- about two-thirds of the total for me, and I'm relatively prolific. If anyone else wants to pick this up, please feel free to interpret it as 'up to 25'.)
( The list -- 'A Law of the Medes and Persians' to 'The Wolf Covers Its Tracks' )
So, what can I say? Actually, I'm surprised -- I'd remembered my first lines as being as mundane as my titles, but although some of them are, in most cases I seem to have actually made the effort to produce something a bit intriguing in an attempt to pull the reader into the story, just as the style guides tell you to do. Quite often I seem to go for a touch of humour, too. Well, well. There are a few that are just there to get the ball into play, as it were, but with any luck in those cases the first scene as a whole will be enough to pique interest.
I do wince at a few of the clumsier ones, and I also seem to be rather verbose at times, don't I? Some of those openings are practically paragraphs in their own right.
There are also a number of very short ones, mostly lines of dialogue -- but I think that can also help to pull the reader in? It usually indicates that we've arrived in the middle of a situation just at the point where something is about to or beginning to happen, and hopefully gets the reader thinking "hang on, what's going on here?".
